by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the film Royal Wedding on Turner Classic Movies as part of their month-long
“Star of the Month” salute to Fred Astaire. It’s an engaging film even though
it’s not one of Astaire’s major works. It was made in 1951 by the Arthur Freed
unit at MGM and directed by Stanley Donen — who had previously co-directed the
films Take Me Out to the Ballgame
and On the Town with Astaire’s
friendly rival at MGM, Gene Kelly (the friendship and mutual respect between
them was readily apparent in 1974, when they made the film That’s
Entertainment and each movingly narrated
tributes to the other) — and was partly inspired by Astaire’s real life and
partly by his previous film Easter Parade. The part of Astaire’s life that inspired Royal Wedding was the marriage of Fred’s sister Adele Astaire in
1931; she got hitched to Lord Cavendish and retired from the stage, settling in
to a life as a British noblewoman, while Fred had the interesting quandary of
what to do for a living now that she was no longer part of his act. (He did
Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorce as
his first post-Adele stage show — and, as it turned out, his last, since right
after The Gay Divorce he went to
Hollywood, signed with RKO and, after making his screen debut in MGM’s Dancing
Lady with Joan Crawford, started the
nine-film series with Ginger Rogers that made both of them superstars and
legends.) So Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote both the script for Royal
Wedding and the lyrics to the songs (Burton
Lane, his alternate collaborator when he couldn’t get the reclusive Frederick
Loewe, composed the music), cast Astaire as half of a brother-and-sister dance
team who get an offer to take their hit Broadway show Every Night at
Seven to London just in time for the royal
wedding — the real one — between Princess Elizabeth (soon to become Queen
Elizabeth II) and Prince Philip. The biggest problem in making the film was
casting Astaire’s sister; the part originally went to June Allyson, who had to
give it up when her husband Dick Powell (ironically, Astaire’s biggest rival
among male musical stars in the 1930’s) got her pregnant.
Next they had the
idea of casting Judy Garland, who had just finished Summer Stock with Gene Kelly, but at the time Judy was an
emotional basket case and had had it with MGM, with moviemaking in general, and
she responded in what had become depressingly familiar ways to the personnel at
MGM in general and Arthur Freed in particular. “For the first week everything
went well,” Hugh Fordin wrote in The World of Entertainment, his biography of Freed. “The second was a short
week, and for a few days Judy worked with [musical director and arranger Saul]
Chaplin on her vocals. At the end of the third week, on June 9 [1950], the
Freed Unit gave a birthday party for her on the rehearsal stage. But beginning
the fourth, she told Donen that she would not be able to rehearse. Donen told
her that these were the last days of rehearsals before the shooting date and
implored her to take this into consideration. ‘Take your choice,’ she said.
Freed intervened and made the change [from morning rehearsals] to afternoons.
On Saturday, June 17, at 11:23 a.m., Judy called to say that she would not be
in to rehearse. Donen again pointed out to her that this was the last day
before pre-recording. No matter, she was not coming in. Freed was apprised of
the situation, and with much pain in his heart he had to give Judy up.” Judy
Garland’s contract with MGM was suspended on June 17, and later she was given
her release from the studio — and on June 19 Freed asked Astaire if he would
accept Jane Powell as his new co-star. “Grab her — please!” Astaire said, even
though Powell was known primarily as a singer with a quasi-operatic voice and
not a dancer, and Astaire’s previous films attempting to turn non-dancing stars
into dance partners (Joan Fontaine in A Damsel in Distress and Paulette Goddard in Second Chorus) had been flops. As things turned out, Astaire was
able to coach Powell at least to look like she was keeping up with him on the dance floor, much the way Gene
Kelly had with Frank Sinatra in their films together (“I was never a dancer,” said
Sinatra, “but Gene Kelly was so talented he made me look like one”), though in
deference to her he did a few more lifts in his dances than he usually did.
The
loss of Judy Garland also indirectly resulted in one of the film’s most famous
numbers: Lane and Lerner had written a big, emotional ballad called “You’re All
the World to Me” to be Judy’s big featured number, and when Jane Powell came in
Freed didn’t think the song would be right for her voice. So Astaire took it
over and used it as the basis for the film’s most famous — and most audaciously
imaginative — number, literally dancing up the four walls of his hotel room and
appearing to defy gravity. The gimmick was that the room set was actually
attached to a giant motor that revolved it, and the camera was bolted to the
set so Astaire was always at the bottom of the set no matter where it and the
camera were. Astaire and Donen are frequently credited with inventing this
technique, but it was actually the product of the demented imagination of Buster
Keaton, who at the end of his 1924 film The Navigator had his character and the leading lady rescued by a
submarine, which does a gravity-defying turn under water which Keaton
represented in the same way — a revolving set, a camera bolted to it, and an
actor who looked like he was
breaking the law of gravity but really wasn’t. (Later the film 2001:
A Space Odyssey used the same technique to
show a flight attendant serving the protagonist a drink in zero gravity.) This
isn’t the only number in Royal Wedding that plays tricks with viewers’ perceptions; earlier in the film,
while the brother-and-sister dance team Tom and Ellen Bowen (Fred Astaire and
Jane Powell) are on an ocean liner from the U.S. to the U.K., they’re asked to
perform at an on-board benefit — only the ship hits a patch of stormy sea and
the floor they’re dancing on starts rocking and throwing them about at odd
angles. At the end a couch comes sliding towards them and they end the number
by collapsing onto it. (In many of Astaire’s musicals he dances on furniture;
in this one, the furniture dances back.) It’s also the one in which Astaire
does his famous dance with a hat rack, as well as some other gym equipment
(he’s supposed to be rehearsing with his sister in the ship’s gym, but she
hasn’t shown up), to an appealing tune by Lane called “The Sunday Jumps.”
(Lerner wrote a lyric for it but it wasn’t used.) This is one Astaire musical
in which the plot is even more trivial and beside the point than usual: on
their way to England Ellen falls for playboy Lord John Brindale (the young and
almost indecently attractive Peter Lawford), while once they get there Tom
finds himself attracted to aspiring dancer Anne Ashmond (Sarah Churchill,
daughter of British prime minister Winston Churchill) and not only ends up with
her but also brings her estranged parents (Albert Sharpe, in a marvelously
droll performance miles above the usually leaden “comic relief” in these
productions, and Viola Roache) together just before the big royal wedding.
Churchill got the part after Freed’s original choice, ballerina Moira Shearer,
star of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s international hit The
Red Shoes, was turned down by Astaire with
the words, “I know she’s wonderful, but what the hell could I do with her?”
Though the derivation from Easter Parade — with the titular royal wedding taking the place of the Easter parade
— is almost too obvious, Royal
Wedding is a delight even though it’s a
minor film in the Astaire canon (which is only to say it isn’t The
Gay Divorcée, Top Hat, Swing Time, Holiday Inn
or The Band Wagon), and aside
from the numbers discussed above it also has the song “How Could You Believe Me
When I Say I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?” (done by
Astaire and Powell as a couple of lowlife jackanapes — it’s clearly an attempt
to repeat the success of “A Couple of Swells” from Easter Parade and it’s the only number where we really miss Judy
Garland, though Powell drops her usual operatic affectations and gets in the
spirit of the thing) and a great big dazzling production number to a song
called “I Left My Hat in Haiti.” Charles reacted to the sight of an all-white
ensemble — “What sort of comprador
version of Haiti is this?” he said — but when you’re watching a Fred Astaire
musical about the last thing you
need to concern yourself with is dramatic verisimilitude. It’s a great, bouncy
number and a feast of Technicolor, also a needed reminder that once upon a time
people who were making color films actually made them colorful, instead of making everything dirty green and brown
and making viewers (this viewer, anyway) wonder why, if they’re going to use so
little of the visible spectrum anyway, they just don’t go ahead and shoot in
black-and-white. One problem with Royal Wedding was the royal wedding itself; though the film takes
place (mostly) in England, it was shot entirely in Hollywood (though I’m sure
they had a second unit in London taking backgrounds for process shots), and MGM
needed color footage of the real
wedding — which only one company, Gaumont, had. Also on the film’s plus side is
a marvelous dual role for Keenan Wynn as twin brothers, the American and
British producers of the Astaire-Powell show, which gets especially hilarious
as they try to talk to each other in slang. Royal Wedding isn’t much as a movie, but it’s thoroughly
professional and, of course, it has the incomparable Astaire, still in dazzling
control of his body at age 51 and making it believable that he’s the brother of
a co-star nearly 30 years younger. But then there are few things in the film
world I’d rather see than Fred Astaire dance!
